Burn Our Horizons
by Second Star On The Left
Summary: Padmé survives Polis Massa, but loses everything except what little remains of her husband. The galaxy changes shape around her, and no one is surprised. The twins didn't get it all from the Skywalkers, after all.
1. Wild and bereft

_**AN:** On AO3, this is posted as a series - I'll be rearranging the chapters to fit chronologically as I write and post them, which is a lot easier in a series on AO3, but we do what we can with the tools given us. _

* * *

Anakin is standing over her when she wakes.

No.

 _Darth Vader_ is standing over her when she wakes. She can feel him beside her even before she opens her eyes, the hush-shush of his breathing through a respirator dragging her uneasily from a drugged sleep, the sickly-sweet waves of his dark-tainted joy, the heavy clomp of his booted false-feet on the steel floor.

She opens her eyes, and she screams.

* * *

He does not take it well.

That she fears him.

But what does he expect?

She has always made it clear that it was not the darkness in him that she loved - the darkness was a part of him that she was forced to accept, if she wanted the light, and he knew that. He has _always_ know that. Padmé loved the boy who sliced her pear with the gifts given him by the Light, loved the boy who wept for the damage inflicted by his own hands in return for his mother's death.

Padmé does not love this… Thing that has sprung from the ruins of the boy she loved. Instead, she curls in on herself, agrees when the medidroid and the healers tell him that it is all for grief of the child, for the imbalances of her body chemistry, and she shuts herself away inside.

Later, she will have to emerge.

For now, she hides somewhere deep down in her heart, by the lake on Naboo, with that beautiful boy and their beautiful children.

* * *

She named them Luke, and Leia. She thinks. She remembers saying the words, but she remembers her babies being alive, remembers Obi-Wan holding them, and obviously that's not real, so maybe she didn't name them at all. Maybe they didn't even cry when they were born. She doesn't know, not really.

By the lake on Naboo, Luke's hair grows the same sandy-gold as Anakin's, and Leia's curls dark around her ears. There is sunshine, and there is laughter, and there is no pain.

The lake on Naboo is far away, but Padmé hides there all the same.

* * *

"We can have other children," Vader says, as if his mask hides her grief as well as his scars. "As many as you would like."

Padmé wants just two children, the perfect babies she gave birth to on Polis Massa, but they are gone now.

"No," she says, a smile forming automatically on her face, a smile reflected in the thick transparasteel of her new bedroom windows, so that he will see it. "Better we don't. They'd only be used against you."

His emotions seem to boil over at the slightest thing now, and she is washed in a froth of sickening pleasure-pride, and she supposes that he thinks she wishes to spare him the risk of having children used against him for his sake.

Padmé knows that if she ever gives birth to another child of Anakin's, it will be swept away by Palpatine, and she will never see it - until one day, the child will die in some horrible accident, and Vader's rage will be turned on some enemy of the Empire or other.

She cannot bear the idea of carrying another child, not while her belly is still soft and round from the twins, not while she's still taking the little yellow tablets every morning to stop herself lactating. It all hurts so much, and she wishes that, if she cannot have her children, she might have Sabé or Dormé with her, or _anyone_ who is not there explicitly on the Emperor's orders.

She's never gone long without someone to trust, without an open ear attached to a closed mouth. It's causing a different sort of ache in her belly, having so much anger and pain trapped in her body without an outlet, and at night, she cries herself to sleep, and dreams of the lake on Naboo.

* * *

Imperial Senators are expected to wear a uniform.

Vader allows her to finish the course of little yellow tablets before reminding her of her senatorial duties, and she spends the better part of a day standing on a stool in the middle of her exquisite if austere apartment, being fitted for sweeping robes and trained capes with high, square shoulders, such as she has noticed becoming the trend in the military parades that sometimes pass below her windows.

Does Vader know that she understands this palace to be a prison? She suspects not, because he genuinely seems to think that she can be happy here, and it is easier not to say a word.

The uniforms are surprisingly comfortable, for how severe the tailoring is. The sleeves are tight but not so much that they limit her movement, and the support of the boned bodices is more welcome than she'd ever admit to her still-tender breasts. The boxy half-cape meant for everyday wear in the Senate chamber is warmer than she expected, and affords her a place to hide her hands during Senate sessions, when she wishes more than anything to leap from her pod and strangle the so-called Emperor with her bare hands, dark powers of the Force or not.

She doesn't care.

Even trying to do it would get her killed, but she doesn't care.

And then Bail sits in her pod, during her seventh session since losing the twins.

* * *

"Ahsoka," she says, tasting a name near forgotten and wondering how they have all come to this. "I have not heard of her in a long time."

"She is the bravest woman I know, short of you," Bail says quietly, the neutral little smile on his face belying the weight of their conversation. "She means to see all the wrongs of the Order righted, in her own way."

"The Order didn't-"

"They did," Bail disagrees pleasantly. "They allowed him to become this. They should have _seen_ , Padmé."

She can't bring herself to argue that point - the Council should not have seen Anakin become this thing, but she should have - so she only shrugs, and nods, and sips her drink. It's sweet and fruity, tasting pink on her tongue and silver in her throat, and if she has more than one she'll feel sick. She almost thinks she'd welcome feeling sick, just for a little variety, and so she finishes her drink and calls for another.

"You've gotten very thin," Bail says, uncharacteristically blunt, his face still bland and fixed and pleasant. "Is he not feeding you?"

Once, Padmé had tried smoking some of the strange herbal things her sister's husband had liked in their youth. Instead of the promised serenity and happiness, she'd been left queasy and paranoid, and had finished the night by vomiting for what had felt like days into an ornamental vase. Bail's blandly pleasant face makes that same queasiness erupt in her stomach, under the stretch marks, and she has to choke back a sudden rush of bile.

"He was not always this," she says, low, urgent, terrified - if she does not defend Anakin, if he hears confirmation of the hatred he must know she bears for the thing he has become, will he turn as cruel to her as he is to his underlings, as brutal as he was to the children at the Temple? "Bail, please, you must know-"

"I did not mean to question your choice of husband," Bail promises her, laying a hand on her arm. The contact shocks her, because no one has touched her except for medidroids in so long, since Obi-Wan carried her into the ship on Mustafar, or maybe since Obi-Wan held her hand and brushed back her hair on Polis Massa. "We are all worried for you, Padmé. Whatever he was when you married him, he is not that now. We do not trust for your safety."

Only her years of training keep her from crying, here, in one of the small social areas within the Senate Building, for all that she has lost.

No one else has _cared_ until now.

* * *

There is a tiny comm in her pocket, when she undresses that night. It has the smooth lines she considers a hallmark of Alderaaian design, sleek and pale green-white and lovely. Everything that comes from Alderaan is.

There is a message, in plain text, on the comm - Padmé hasn't seen a text-only comm in years, not since she was Queen and her handmaidens sometimes used them to communicate discreetly while attending her, or pretending to be her.

 _0100 standard. The usual place._

Bail's callsign feels almost like a mockery - is this all a ruse? Will he turn her in, put her in Vader's arms as a traitor?

(Will Vader's hands once more seal her throat from twenty yards away? She never feared the Force, not until Anakin used it to try and kill her.)

Turning in a traitor would buy an awful lot of good will for Alderaan, and Bail Organa is nothing if not loyal to his homeworld. If he was known to be so loyal as to hand over someone thought to be conspiring against the Empire, then there would be no way for anyone to doubt Alderaan's position _within_ the Empire, least of all the Emperor himself.

However, Bail as she knows him - as she knew him, she supposes - was always more a dissident than anything. It was with him that she first shared her fears over the fractured, falling state of the Republic, and with him that she gathered a band of conspirators. It was with Bail that she began planning a mass succession from the Republic, for fear of it becoming just precisely this.

Has it really been less than a year?

 _Usual password?_ she comms back, not caring whether this is the right thing or the wrong. She's reached a point of do-or-die - if she doesn't do, she will die.

And frankly, Padmé thinks, sitting down at the elaborate dressing table in her elaborate bedroom and picking up an elaborate comb, there's far too much fighting left for her to just lay down and die.

* * *

Bail's official offices in the Senate Office Building are much the same as Padmé's own, touched here and there with hints of his personality - a banner of the House of Organa which hangs behind his desk, two broad stripes the rich green of their precious emerald grapes sharp against the misty silver-grey background, primary among them.

His other office, hidden away in the financial district, is far more nondescript, and far less likely to be spied upon. It could be the office of any comfortable financier, with shuttered windows and heavy doors, and Padmé breathes deeply as soon as she is inside.

Mon is there. Tall and elegant and regal, just as she has always been, and there is compassion in her lovely face without any of the pity or scorn Padmé had feared she would be met with.

"I am so, so sorry," Mon says, taking Padmé's face in her hands. "Bail told me of your loss, my friend. I am sorry."

Padmé remembers, very slightly, that Mon lost a child. It was years ago, during Padmé's first year or two as a senator, but evidently the pain does not fade.

A little boy, she thinks. She half remembers seeing holos of the boy, red hair dimmed by the blue transmission, but he had his mother's long nose and high brow, even as little more than a toddler. She wonders what her babies would have looked like, because she cannot believe that they would match up with her dreams of the lake on Naboo.

"There is nothing to compare it to," Bail agrees, arriving beside them with a cup in his hand - a cup for Padmé, evidently, since he takes her hand and wraps her fingers around the warm porcelain. "Breha and I have had- difficulties. We know something of your pain, but, of course, there are none of us here who know all of it."

Other friends are gathered, friends who Padmé has known and trusted with everything in her life short of Anakin for years now, and she sinks into this remnant of her old life as easily as if she had never left, as if she does not have to be sure to be back in her new apartments in the Imperial Palace at least an hour before dawn so that Vader does not know she left, as if her skin does not crawl with every second she spends in her husband's company, as if she does not wake every night at least once, screaming for all that she has lost, that he has done.

"I know the other side of it," someone says, and Padmé chokes back a sob when Ahsoka steps forward, her lovely face drawn and new scars criss-crossing her arms and shoulders. "Had I known what he would become, Senator Amidala, I would never have left the Order."

"Had I know what he would become," Padmé says, "I would have smothered him in his sleep years ago."

There is a beat, a choking silence (and doesn't she understand just how that feels, better than anyone else in this dimly lit office), and then a burst of laughter that might be hysteria, but which feels like healing.

Padmé manages to join in before everyone else stops.

* * *

Everything she knows of Vader's movements, and of the Emperor's, in return for a safe haven, and a home, once the Empire falls.

Padmé wants nothing more than to see the Empire fall, except perhaps the lake on Naboo, with a fair-haired boy and a dark-haired girl and a man whose temper scared him more than anything except the thought of her coming to harm.

But she cannot have the lake on Naboo, not really. So she will become a charming, eager wife to Lord Vader, and she will force herself not to show even the slight hint of revulsion when the Emperor presses his scaly lips to her hand, and she will become a font of knowledge for the Rebellion, gathering intelligence that no one else could possibly reach.

Ahsoka kisses her on both cheeks, as fierce and powerful as Padmé feels small and lost, and it feels like a beginning, a flash of true hope where Padmé has only known despair, this last while. If she and Ahsoka could become friends, building something good from the ruins of Anakin's legacy, then perhaps all is not lost.

Bail tucks the little porcelain cup into a tiny box stuffed with soft cloth, and tells her to bring it with her. There is a transmitter embedded in the base, and if she keeps the cup with her - a cup decorated with the crest of the Royal House of Naboo, so it will not draw undue attention - they will always be able to find her.

She takes it as a promise, rather than a threat.

"My children are lost," she whispers to the broad panes of transparasteel around her bed, looking out over the theatre district, looking out over a life she cannot believe has continued unchanged since the rise of the Empire. "But the galaxy is not."

She could not save her children, but maybe she can save the galaxy. It might not be the legacy she wanted, that she _wants,_ but it is a better legacy than most, and it will have to do.


	2. Endlessly caving in

"Lady Amidala," a grunt says, and Padmé flinches. _Queen_ Amidala, _Senator_ Amidala, but never _Lady_ Amidala - elected, elected, _dictated._

"Lady Amidala," a grunt says, and Padmé turns. "Lord Vader has requested that you join him tonight - the Emperor will be visiting."

* * *

The Emperor was once Sheev, a guiding hand in Padmé's days as a newcomer to Coruscanti politics. He was once kind and warm, teasing and smiling as often as he frowned and offered censure.

Now he is a thing that makes shadows even of suns, and sons, and ruins everything he touches. Padmé wonders if he has always ruined all upon which he lays his hands, and wonders if she was only the first in a long line of casualties.

Vader wheezes while she picks at the luxuriant spread on their dining table, set in the style of Alderaan.

The tiny weight of her Alderaanian communicator drags her corewards by the neck, burning through her breastbone where it hangs on a long black ribbon.

Everything she wears now is black - she is not of high military rank, and so white is not a viable choice, and the red of the Emperor's personal guard is considered beneath her. So it is black, and she is a match to her mad ruin of a husband and his madder, ruinous master.

"You are very quiet, my dear," the Emperor says, reaching around the round table to touch her tight-held hand. His fingers are warm, his skin soft and smooth, and she wishes they were not. His hands should be cold, his skin clammy and slick, like a corpse, like the dark he has spread over the Senate.

She pulls back slowly, so as to avoid insult, and smiles. Her smiles have shifted, she knows, sees it in the faces of her rare few friends. It is a thing of shadows now, just as she has become - a knife in the shadows, she hopes, because if she cannot be dangerous then she is nothing at all, not anymore.

* * *

"I will train you to fight," Ahsoka says when next they meet in Bail's other office. She has a bandage of black linen wrapped around her arm, an archaic measure but a cheap one, and it reeks of something floral and sweet whenever it moves - Padmé thinks for a moment of some purple flower, but cannot name it.

"It would be good for you to train," Bail says, folding his arms and looking at her with a level of concern that makes her feel achingly guilty. Unless she is caught in an attempt on the Emperor's life, Vader will find some way to spare her, but her friends have no such obsessive guard dogs.

"I know how to fight," she says, because she does. She trained with her handmaidens, she trained with- with her husband, before his death. With his friend, who was her friend as well, whose friend she was first.

Obi-Wan trained her in many things. He is gone now, and she misses him as much for the hope he would give her as for anything else.

No, that is a lie. She misses him for the balance he gave Anakin, which failed so quickly when he was away for so short a time.

"I know how to fight," she says, folding her own arms and feeling how frail they have become, how fragile _she_ has become.

 _Dangerous, or nothing at all._

"Teach me how to fight."

Vader does not question it when she begins to spend more time with Mon Mothma - they were always friends, after all, and Mon has long been under suspicion as a rebel. What better way to dissuade her disloyalty than to have Vader's own Lady keep an eye?

Mon holds her, when she weeps. For her babies, for the galaxy, and even for Anakin, when her moods dip dark enough.

In Mon's apartment, with the help of clever little droids who shield and deflect and project tame imaginings onto the screens built into Mon's windows, Padmé learns to fight under Ahsoka's instruction.

It is endless, Ahsoka merciless, and Padmé relentless.

If she relents, then he has _won._ She is no longer sure who _he_ is - the Emperor, Anakin, Vader, cowardly Obi-Wan - but she will defeat him. She will be stronger than any of them.

She has to be, or she lost her babies for nothing.

* * *

Mon wears white, and sits like a beam of moonlight between Padmé and Bail, celestial and serene while they brood like black holes on either side of her.

"Smile, my friends," Mon says, a breath and an echo of laughter, in that curious way of hers. "We have an audience."

True enough, some cadre of cronies has settled at the table nearest theirs in the Senate lounge. All dressed in layer upon layer of black, a cowled hood here and a sweeping cape there, rigid shoulders to mimic the military uniforms, a curiously looping necklace inspired by the stormtroopers' helmets, any number of things to curry favour with the man who has deemed himself above all others.

Padmé's black clothes are severe, sharply tailored and functional before anything else, Bail's softened only by the sweep of his Alderaanian-cut cape, and neither of them have a taste for adornment anymore.

Vader leaves so many gifts of jewellery on Padmé's table that she cannot wear any jewellery at all anymore. She especially cannot wear a necklace, not without phantom hands seizing her throat and _squeezing._

The fools in their false jewels sneer when they see her glancing, but their confidence falls when her gaze does not. _Lady Vader,_ she hears someone whisper, and feels sick.

* * *

She bloodies Ahsoka's mouth for the first time two years to the day after she woke up with Vader looming over her, and laughs.

"I never thought such a thing would be possible," she admits, looking at her leather-wrapped knuckles and feeling like one of the ruffians who used fight under the docks in Theed. _Dangerous._ "You are a skillful teacher, Ahsoka."

"You are a furious pupil, Naberrie," Ahsoka says ruefully, wiping blood from her lip with the back of her hand. "If only you were Force sensitive, I could take you for an apprentice."

"And here I thought you walked out without being knighted, Mistress Tano," Mon says, mild as milk, and Ahsoka sticks out her tongue. "Had Senator Amidala been Force-sensitive, like as not _you_ would have been the pupil, and she your master."

"I am older," Padmé points out, and Ahsoka sticks her tongue out again, this time at Padmé. "But less experienced, in this at least. Thank you, Ahsoka. I can never repay you."

"Hurt him," Ahsoka says, clasping Padmé's arm, wrist to wrist. "Hurt him, and help us win. I can ask no more."

* * *

"You are tired," Vader says, and Padmé flashes him the edge of her smile.

"Nightmares," she says, thin and taut, and she thinks that he recoils - it is so hard to tell, in the armour. "It is nothing."

 _Ahsoka_ , she wants to tell him. _Your precious Snips has become my teacher. Together, we will destroy you._

But he would never believe her, and the Emperor would convince him that such ravings are a sign that her mind has snapped.

Best hold, and wait. It will keep.

* * *

When next the Emperor dines with them, he tells Vader the tale of the the Elders, the first conquerors of Naboo, long since lost to fates unknown.

Padmé knows these stories, and told them to Anakin a thousand thousand heartbeats and more ago. Vader drinks them in as if unknown, and she is glad of it - it helps, to keep her husband and her jailer apart in her mind. It hurts less.

She climbed the statues and temples they left behind, when she was a child - she and Sola used race, used see who could climb farthest fastest, clambering over a pillar here and a statue there.

Jar Jar had once confided in her some secrets the Gungans had of the Elders, secrets he was not supposed to share, and she remembers them now. It is easier to remember than to listen, because all the Emperor sees in the Elders is a lesson to be learned, about how carefully power must be guarded.

Padmé remembers Jar Jar telling her of beautiful art the Gungans keep hidden deep in their cities, art of the Elders in their prime.

 _"Thesa brands are the mark of a warrior,"_ he had explained, pointing here and there at the holo. _"Fierce fighters, and only the fiercest got to be marked."_

How hard would it be, Padmé wonders, to find someone willing to brand her as the danger she must be?

Ahsoka will know. If not Ahsoka, then some of Bail's grimy contacts. Someone will know, and then, so will she.

 _Never nothing,_ she thinks, sipping the bloody red wine and thinking of Ahsoka's bloodied smile. _Dangerous, as only I can be._


End file.
